Boxoffice - October 2016

NATO
COMMUNIQUÉ
SUMMER AND
SMOKE AND
MIRRORS
It turns out the
box office was on fire
n Summer 2016 was terrible except when it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t terrible most of the time, but as is
so often the case, a few high-profile underperforming
movies had the trade press dumping shovelsful of dirt
on the summer before it was
scarcely under way. A headline
by Patrick Corcoran
Vice President &
Chief Communications Officer, NATO
in the Hollywood Reporter on
June 13 moaned, “Summer
Box-Office Slump: Revenue
Down a Steep 22 Percent.”
While on the surface the
comparison was for a similar
period of time—the first day
of summer in 2015 and 2016
through the current equivalent
weekend—the 2015 summer
season had started five days
sooner and accounted for
$292.6 million. Now, you can’t make that money disappear,
but what you can do is not measure two very
different things and call them the same.
Are there better ways to compare? There are certainly
different ways to compare. The Reporter article
went on to include the last weekend in April and the
first week of May 2016 in its comparison and found
SUMMER BOX OFFICE COMPARISON
Summer 2015 Grosses Summer 2016 Grosses % Change
5/1/15 292,640,478 4/29/16 0 —
5/8/15 168,727,412 5/6/16 302,628,059 179.36%
5/15/15 243,586,694 5/13/16 169,268,655 69.49%
5/22/15 231,768,983 5/20/16 181,154,859 78.16%
5/29/15 198,313,697 5/27/16 247,439,455 124.77%
6/5/15 188,291,344 6/3/16 190,061,877 100.94%
6/12/15 393,713,737 6/10/16 218,382,032 55.47%
6/19/15 359,473,644 6/17/15 361,164,197 100.47%
6/26/15 309,439,308 6/24/16 290,896,374 94.01%
7/3/15 221,244,854 7/1/16 310,564,753 140.37%
7/10/15 317,612,738 7/8/16 323,715,213 101.92%
7/17/15 286,979,960 7/15/16 246,401,967 85.86%
7/24/15 235,547,360 7/22/16 295,834,880 125.59%
7/31/15 228,861,504 7/29/16 283,552,333 123.90%
8/7/15 197,132,912 8/5/16 329,488,720 167.14%
8/14/15 217,648,599 8/12/16 253,976,486 116.69%
8/21/15 151,661,156 8/19/16 187,148,355 123.40%
8/28/15 123,741,389 8/26/16 163,873,888 132.43%
9/4/15 117,372,016 9/2/16 128,401,492 109.40%
TOTAL $4,483,757,785 TOTAL $4,483,953,595 100%
SOURCE: COMSCORE
2016 still lagging by 14 percent, which isn’t surprising,
because that week didn’t include the first big debut of
summer. Another way to look at the summer to date
might have been to compare the first week of summer
’15 and the first week of summer ’16, which would
have yielded that previously mentioned $292.6 million
for 2015, and—wait for it—$302.6 million for 2016.
Up 3.4 percent. Or you could compare the first week
of summer ’15 to the nonexistent equivalent week, and
2015 comes out ahead by infinity percent.
The point here is not that comparisons shouldn’t
be made, but to understand what it is that you are
comparing, or better still to recognize that the sample
size is too small to draw any useful conclusions. This
is the problem with comparing any weekend to a corresponding
weekend in an earlier year. Not only is the
sample size too small to draw useful conclusions, but
the premise that the movies opening on this particular
weekend have anything in common, or should gross
the same or better than the movies that opened a year
before, is difficult to sustain. It is even more spurious
that the health of an industry should be judged based
on those shaky comparisons.
The parade of bad headlines continued. Variety
weighed in with, “Box Office Meltdown: Hollywood
Races to Win Back Summer Crowds,” noting
that “Ticket sales are down roughly 10 percent this
summer, but the slide is more precipitous than those
numbers suggest.” While also failing to mention that
summer 2015 included an extra week, the entertainment
bible brought on perennial doomsayer Hal Vogel
to intone, “The theater business has weaker prospects
going forward than at any time in the last 30 years. It’s
encountering visible strain this summer. It’s a superhero,
mega-blockbuster, tentpole strategy run amuck.
There’s too much of it, and it’s not working.”
Note that a month after the Hollywood Reporter
sounded the alarm about a 22 percent decrease year
over year (caused, remember, by an extra week of 2015
summer box office), that deficit is now 10 percent.
The rush to find a trend in limited data is not new,
nor is the compulsion to peg a movie’s underperformance
relative to its budget symptomatic of flagging
moviegoer desire, but this summer may have hit a new
mark in industry analysts ignoring what is happening
right under their noses.
In mid-June, when the Hollywood Reporter piece
came out, there had been six head-to-head summer
weeks or weekends. Three of them were up compared
to 2015 and three were down. As the story noted, the
weekend just past was down 44 percent. It did not
note that the first head-to-head week of summer was
up 79 percent in 2016. Nor did it note that year-todate,
2016 was ahead of 2015.
The disconnection was even starker by the time
Variety made the summer stand in for an industry in
crisis. Aside from YTD box office being up 2 percent
(which they did note) and the summer deficit having
16 BoxOffice ® OCTOBER 2016